This three-minute excerpt is posted here by permission of the producers, Andrew Lyman-Clarke, Editor/Distribution Associate, Witness Films, 802-578-3625. The film was directed and the interview was done by Philip Singer, Ph.D.
See http://www.witnessfilms.com/documentary. If you would like to purchase the hour-long documentary interview with Professor Szasz, go to http://www.witnessfilms.com/documentary.
It is definitely worth purchasing the hour-long film. These film makers are first rate.

The
purpose of this site is
to advance the debate about
Thomas S. Szasz's basic
ideas and their practical
implications.

This is the only official Szasz site. It was created, constructed, and produced by
Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D. with the permission and guidance over the course of many years from his close friend and colleague,
Professor Thomas S. Szasz. This site was given to Dr. Schaler by Dr. Szasz. All rights reserved.

I produced and created this site as a public education service. I make no money on this site. Anyone and everyone is free to use material on this site, however, we do require that if you use material, please
acknowledge the source, that is www.szasz.com, and include the following statement with any photograph or text that you want to use:

Reproduced with the permission of Jeffrey A. Schaler. All rights reserved.

Thomas Szasz and Jeff Schaler suggest that visitors to this site read the following summary statement as a
manifesto...a summary statement of Dr. Szasz's work and ideas.

Please note: Neither Thomas S. Szasz, MD, nor Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D., are "anti-psychiatrists." We both believe in psychiatry between
consenting adults. We are opposed to institutional psychiatry and coercion. We are not opposed to contractual or consenual psychoanalysis, psychotherapy,
or counseling, what have you, as long as the designated client is able to fire his or her therapist at any time. Obviously we do not consider drugs as medicine
for behavior. If people want to take drugs to control
the way they think, feel, behave and perceive, by all means they should be free to do so. See Szasz's important work: Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, published by Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2009.
See the review by Dr. Ron Roberts in The Freeman, September 22, 2010.

It is my hope that I will establish a "szasz blog" here on the site, for contributions and discussions.

If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.--Thomas S. Szasz, The Second Sin, Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City, NY. 1973, p. 113.

It takes an iconoclast with temerity and acumen to illuminate how unexamined myths and metaphors insidiously determine prevailing norms --
norms considered unassailable and sacrosanct by the prevailing medical/legal system. For decades, Thomas Szasz has publicly challenged the excesses
that obscure reason. The Medicalization of Everyday Life offers a no-nonsense perspective on prevailing dogma. It is only through clear
vision that intelligent choices can be made. Required reading for all professionals in health care fields, and all those who are subject to their
unwitting prejudices.
--Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D., Director, The Milton Erickson Foundation

Praise from George Annas for Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry, by Thomas Szasz, published by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswich,
New Jersey, 2007:

A powerful and fittingly impassioned indictment of psychiatrists who use coercion to "treat" patients by the psychiatrist who has done more
than anyone else to challenge psychiatry to abandon the destructive use of force and replace it with consent, trust, and adherence to the Hippocratic injunction
to "do no harm."

George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H.
Edward Utley Professor and Chair
Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights
Boston University School of Public Health
Author of The Rights of Patients

Several interesting and outstanding events and activities are occurring as Grand Rounds at the Department of Psychiatry, Upstate Medical University. This year
kicks off a sincere appreciation and CELEBRATION of Thomas Szasz's remarkable life and contributions to liberty and responsibility. Many colleagues were and are
privileged to call themselves close friends of Tom Szasz (with apologies to Bill Clinton . . . ).

It was a great honor for me to be invited by Professor Chaitanya Haldipur, and former chair of the psychiatry department at Upstate Medical University
Professor Mantosh Dewan, to give the first Grand Rounds lecture in honor of Tom on Thursday, February 13, 2014, at 12:30pm, at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. The title of my talk was:
Games Psychiatrists Play .

Chaitanya Haldipur, long a close friend of Tom's and I am honored to say a friend of mine, took me out for a wonderful Italian dinner the night before my lecture, and Mantosh Dewan, former chair of the Dept of Psychiatry for
many years, introduced me at the start of my talk. I must say it was one of the nicest introductions I have ever received. (It sure was a long way from how I was treated
after teaching for 22 years at American University's Department of Justice, Law and Society, in the School of Public Affairs!)

Mantosh gave an equally beautiful
appreciation of Tom at the start of our symposium in honor of Tom's eightieth birthday in Weiskotten Hall, years ago. When it comes to appreciation and introductions, no one
speaks more eloquently and more sincerely than Mantosh. What a wonderful person.

It was a full house on Thursday, February 13, 2014, when I spoke after lunch at 12:30pm. You are welcome to read the handout I gave to those who attended my talk, again, an invited lecture for Grand Rounds,
"kicking off the year of celebrating their beloved Thomas Szasz"
in a series of forthcoming Grand Rounds.

Another important Grand Rounds gathering was scheduled for August 8, 2014. "Celebration of the Life and Work of Thomas Szasz"
Save-The-Date, Pre-registration is Required, Friday, August 8, 2014, Everson Museum, in Syracuse, 8am to 3pm - reception to follow. Contact Cassandra Read (readc@upstate.edu) if you want to attend.
Travel to Syracuse to attend this historic gathering. Register NOW! Location is
Hosmer Auditorium of the Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, New York. 8:00am to 3:00pm. Reception to follow from 3:00pm to 5:00pm. For
further information, please contact Linette Thorp at (315) 464-3104, or, by email at thorpl@upstate.edu. This event is free, but pre-registration is required.
Registration deadline is August 6, 2014. See the program here.

This book also contains the only written autobiography by Thomas Szasz. Note that when this book was published, The New England Journal of Medicine
AND the Journal of the American Medical AssociationBOTH published reviews of the book simultaneously. (See more reviews here.) Praise also came from George Annas for
Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics, edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler, published by Open Court Publishers, Chicago, 2004:
"Anyone who has ever had qualms about the state giving psychiatrists the power to use drugs and civil commitment to control its citizens on the basis of 'mental
illness' will be deeply rewarded by this stellar intellectual performance by Szasz, who not only holds his liberty-centered ground, but often gains more in direct
and sometimes brutally frank responses to his critics and would-be reshapers of his life's work."

See the Szaszian debate with Dr. Jeffrey A. Schaler and Jacob Sullum on one side, and
Allen Frances, MD, Editor-in-Chief of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Mental Disorders), published by the American Psychiatric Association,
Washington, D.C., and University of Maryland Baltimore Law Professor Amanda C. Pustilnik, on the other side. This is a great debate, sponsored by the
prestigious Cato Foundation, and moderated by Editor: Jason Kuznicki.Cato Unbound is a forum for the discussion of diverse and often controversial ideas and opinions. The views
expressed on the website belong to their authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff or supporters of the
Cato Institute.

Here is the first time Thomas Szasz used the term, the "therapeutic state," in writing. Check it out:

Although we may not know it, we have, in our day,
witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major
implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.
--Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1963, p. 212.

(Many people do not realize that the term "the therapeutic state" was coined by Dr. Szasz. Many realize that it was, but refuse to acknowledge that Szasz coined
the term. Worse, others act as though THEY coined the term. Cf: See a review of James Nolan's book entitled The Therapeutic State: Government at Century's End
by Jeffrey A. Schaler which appeared in the prestigious SOCIETY magazine, published out of Rutgers--The State University, by Transaction Publishers, and judge for yourself whether plagiarism was committed.)

"Perhaps most radically ... Thomas Szasz deemed mental illness a mythic and monstrous beast,
and proclaimed that 'mental illness' was a fiction. Insanity, he has continued ever since
to claim, is not a real disease, whose nature has been progressively scientifically unveiled;
mental illness is rather a myth, forged by psychiatrists for their own greater glory.
Over the centuries, medical men and their supporters have been involved, argues Szasz,
in a self-serving 'manufacture of madness.' In this, he indicts both the pretensions of
organic psychiatry and the psychodynamic followers of Freud, whose notion of the
'unconscious' in effect breathed new life into the obsolete metaphysical Cartesian dualism.
For Szasz, any expectation of finding the etiology of mental illness in body or mind --
above all in some mental underworld -- must be a lost cause, a dead-end, a linguistic error,
and even an exercise in bad faith. 'Mental illness' or the 'unconscious' are not realities
but at best metaphors. In promoting such ideas, psychiatrists have either been involved in
improper cognitive imperialism or have rather naively pictorialized the psyche -- reifying
the fictive substance behind the substantive. Properly speaking, contends Szasz, insanity
is not a disease with origins to be excavated, but a behavior with meanings to be decoded.
Social existence is a rule-governed game-playing ritual in which the mad person bends the
rules and exploits the loopholes. Since the mad person is engaged in social performances
that obey certain expectations so as to defy others, the pertinent questions are not about
the origins, but about the conventions, of insanity. In this light, Szasz dismisses
traditional approaches to the history of madness, as questions mal post and aims to
reformulate them."--From: Porter, R., "Introduction," in Porter, R. and Wright, D., eds.,The
Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); pp. 1-19; p. 2.

Cf. the following article by the late psychologist Theodore Sarbin entitled "On the Obsolescence of the Schizophrenia Hypothesis:. The similarity of Sarbin's thinking to Tom Szasz's regarding the myth of schizophrenia
is uncanny, and I have never found any evidence to suggest that Sarbin stole any of Tom's idea's. Quite to the contrary, when I spoke at the American Psychological association in Boston, years ago, there was a failed attempt
by several authors of the then DSM to ridicule me in public. Theodore Sarbin, who was given a prestigious award by the American Psychiatric Association then, rushed to my defense publicly and I will be forever grateful for
what he said then. As Tom Szasz and I used to judge those colleague we considered courageous and smart, I refer to Theodore Sarbin as one "good guy." As Allen Frances, Editor-in-Chief of the DSM, said in my debate with him
and elsewhere earlier, 'the DSM is bullshit.'" True believers take heed. JAS